Ravi Somaiya

Palin, and her fanatical followers, are not a new breed, according to the International Herald Tribune. Commentators are looking to a 1960s essay — the Paranoid Style of American Politics by Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter — to explain her, and the tea party-ers. "I call it the paranoid style because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind," he wrote. Sounds familiar. [IHT]